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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The Wedge and the Wooden Spoon

I was working on a history post and came across this charming little picture in an ad for a Victorian slang dictionary. And that made me wonder: what on earth is a Wedge and Wooden Spoon?

So this will be the slang of the week. It was British university slang in the 19th century. The Wedge was the person at the bottom of the Classical Tripos at Cambridge - after Wedgwood, the man in the first graduating class (1824) who occupied that position. Later bottom-of-the-class grads were first nicknamed Wedgwoods, which later became Wooden Wedge. And the Wooden Spoon? He was the person who did the worst in the Mathematical Tripos.

The Tripos is the term used to refer to final exams for the bachelor's degree at Oxford and Cambridge. it is supposed to have been derived from the term for the three-legged stool the student sat in during his exams.

The Wedge and Spoon certainly look happy enough in the little cartoon, though.

The cartoon is from an ad for Slang Dictionary: or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and "Fast" Expressions of High and Low Society (the ad is in James Russell Lowell's The Biglow Papers [1863], p. 202). This is a book that I am very anxious to read (and will, since it is digitzed), since I always like to know just what to say in High and Low Society!

About Kitsch and Retro

Welcome! I'm Lidian and this is Kitsch and Retro...I love vintage ads, retro homemaking, and domestic history - from the Victorian era to the 1970s. I hope you will enjoy your visit as much as I enjoy writing this blog - and that you find it as full of quirky fun stuff as a 1950s molded salad - minus the celery, because ugh, celery.